Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SOMIRO (Soft Milli-robots)
Berichtszeitraum: 2021-01-01 bis 2022-06-30
Precision agriculture for rice farming and smart methods such as aquaponics are vital to ensure a safe supply of fresh food for Europe while reducing our environmental footprint. In line with the Digitising European Industry initiative under their description of smart agriculture, the SOMIRO project will develop a flat-worm-inspired mm-scale swimming robot with month-long energy autonomy, local intelligence, and ability to continuously generate data and optically communicate to reduce farming’s environmental impact in terms of carbon footprint, over fertilization, pesticide use, and overfeeding. Swimming robots would cover a much larger area than stationary systems and could be rapidly deployed and self-redistribute where most needed. They may serve as a stand-alone monitoring solution for indoor farming or complement drone-based remote sensing in outdoors scenarios.
Until today, no energy autonomous (untethered and with local intelligence) milli-robot capable of hours of continuous operation has been demonstrated. The major reason for this is power limitation: locomotion requires much power and small robots have very limited energy storage and energy harvesting. Our milli-robot will be less than 1 cm long and show how soft and stretchable systems, with undulating swimming like flat worms, require far less energy for locomotion than other systems of comparable size. For power, it will not rely on any dedicated infrastructure but only on ambient light.
The design of SOMIRO focuses on its industry transfer: industrial partners will use cutting-edge assembly technologies that can scale up to production volumes with no change in process. The bulk materials are low-cost elastomers and polymers and the electronic circuits will be based on commercial components. Throughout the project, all application scenarios and exploitation plans will be developed in close collaboration among the SOMIRO partner enterprises and end-users, and external industrial stakeholders.
Until today, no energy autonomous (untethered and with local intelligence) milli-robot capable of hours of continuous operation has been demonstrated. The major reason for this is power limitation: locomotion requires much power and small robots have very limited energy storage and energy harvesting. Our milli-robot will be less than 1 cm long and show how soft and stretchable systems, with undulating swimming like flat worms, require far less energy for locomotion than other systems of comparable size. For power, it will not rely on any dedicated infrastructure but only on ambient light.
The design of SOMIRO focuses on its industry transfer: industrial partners will use cutting-edge assembly technologies that can scale up to production volumes with no change in process. The bulk materials are low-cost elastomers and polymers and the electronic circuits will be based on commercial components. Throughout the project, all application scenarios and exploitation plans will be developed in close collaboration among the SOMIRO partner enterprises and end-users, and external industrial stakeholders.
For the first 18 months, work on overall architecture and robot design have been combined with studies on the eight fundamental technologies that are key to achieve the goal of SOMIRO, and fundamental studies on locomotion. In the design and implementation, it has focused on the larger scale, G1, swimming robot. With the worldwide shortage of semiconductor components, the robot needed larger components and a microcontroller with volatile memory. The robot was designed to work in a duty-cycle down to 0.2 sun solar intensity. All components have been delivered and the manufacturing of the robot is planned for August 2022.
On the critical component development for G1, a batch production manufacturing process was realized with high yield for the propulsion unit and swimming was showed with a tethered component. On the energy harvesting, a small four-cell solar panel showed the high capacity of 4.5 V and 12 mW at 0.25 sun. The on-site demonstration sites have been studied and it was decided that the demonstration will be made at the premises of aquaponic farmer, The Circle. When studying the environmental conditions, the most suitable spots in the basins had solar intensity never higher than 0.5 sun and most often above 0.2 sun.
In parallel, further development for the fully miniaturized and autonomous G2 milli-robot was made. Thin film sensors that operate at room temperature meet the requirements of the end user at the set power budget. On the communication, both uplink and downlink development were made. Especially, a novel technique for solar cell communication was developed with very high efficiency. Based on the G1 PCB design, a rigid-flex G2 PCB board with a first set of components was made and tested.
On the critical component development for G1, a batch production manufacturing process was realized with high yield for the propulsion unit and swimming was showed with a tethered component. On the energy harvesting, a small four-cell solar panel showed the high capacity of 4.5 V and 12 mW at 0.25 sun. The on-site demonstration sites have been studied and it was decided that the demonstration will be made at the premises of aquaponic farmer, The Circle. When studying the environmental conditions, the most suitable spots in the basins had solar intensity never higher than 0.5 sun and most often above 0.2 sun.
In parallel, further development for the fully miniaturized and autonomous G2 milli-robot was made. Thin film sensors that operate at room temperature meet the requirements of the end user at the set power budget. On the communication, both uplink and downlink development were made. Especially, a novel technique for solar cell communication was developed with very high efficiency. Based on the G1 PCB design, a rigid-flex G2 PCB board with a first set of components was made and tested.
Progress beyond state of the art has been made in the following:
• Novel communication technology for solar cells.
• Novel high-performing 4-cell solar module
• Novel ultra-low-power chemical sensor
• Novel miniaturized swimming actuating fin unit
The expected results are that we will be providing an energy-efficient locomotion and physical intelligence of a swimming soft milli-robot, reaching a month-long energy autonomy. The robot will have ultra-low-power sensing, local computing and reliable wireless communication in the size constraint of the milli-robot. The millirobot will show step change performance improvement over the current state of the art. In addition, automated manufacturing, by assembly and packaging, of integrated soft milli-robots will be demonstrated.
• Novel communication technology for solar cells.
• Novel high-performing 4-cell solar module
• Novel ultra-low-power chemical sensor
• Novel miniaturized swimming actuating fin unit
The expected results are that we will be providing an energy-efficient locomotion and physical intelligence of a swimming soft milli-robot, reaching a month-long energy autonomy. The robot will have ultra-low-power sensing, local computing and reliable wireless communication in the size constraint of the milli-robot. The millirobot will show step change performance improvement over the current state of the art. In addition, automated manufacturing, by assembly and packaging, of integrated soft milli-robots will be demonstrated.